Coding Gymnasion since 1999

About the Gymnasion

Welcome to the gymnasion! This is the personal website and weblog of Christoph Nahr. Use the Google-powered search box if you’re looking for anything in particular – it searches both website and weblog.

Curious visitors may consult my historical note on the website’s peculiar name and twin domains. The header image shows Leo von Klenze’s beautiful 1846 reconstruction of the Athenian Akropolis since I haven’t found any pictures of the Kynosarges itself.

Kynosarges Website

The original website is composed of static pages, with comments powered by Disqus. Here you can find my open-source projects and longer technical articles, plus archives of my book reviews and link collections on various subjects.

Visit the following index pages to show categorized lists of all content pages. You can also use the drop-down menus in the sidebar to access content pages directly (requires JavaScript).

This website is accessible through two domains, kynosarges.org and kynosarges.de. Both point to the same files and can be used interchangeably. See below for the history behind these twin domains.

Several pages contain tables wrapped in automatically resizing scroll boxes. This feature requires JavaScript and is described here. Mobile browsers won’t show scroll bars on tables that don’t fit the viewport, but you can still scroll them by swiping left and right.

Kynosarges Weblog

The companion weblog is a self-hosted WordPress installation. All news and plans for my articles and projects appear there, along with any other ramblings that strike my fancy. See the categorized post archive for an overview of all the nonsense I’ve been posting.

Copy the RSS feed into your news reader to subscribe to the weblog. Alternatively, receive post notifications by email using the subscription feature in the weblog’s sidebar.

Contact Me

Here’s how you can get in touch with me, aside from the commenting facilities below.

You can follow me on Twitter as an alternative to the feed subscription. I’m tweeting links to new and updated articles. The more important updates also appear on Google+.

About the Author

I’ve been fascinated with computers ever since I loaned a friend’s Sinclair ZX81 in the early 1980s. That was followed by the amazing Commodore 64 (with a floppy drive!) and some bulky CP/M contraptions, until the rising tide of IBM PC clones with Microsoft Windows swept all else away.

On the programming side, I naturally started out with BASIC and machine language since that’s what the old “home computers” offered. Although I wrote some C at university, the teaching languages in my time (1988–94) were still Ada, Pascal, and Modula-2. Eventually I taught myself various popular modern languages – C++, C#, Java, and a smattering of others.

Computers are also my favorite platform for electronic games, especially strategy and role-playing. Lately I discovered Apple’s iPad as another excellent device for board game adaptations. You’ll find occasional news & reviews on the weblog, and my own strategy game projects on the website.

Historical Note

The Κυνοσαργες (Kynosarges) was an ancient Greek gymnasion dedicated to Herakles, situated in the demos Diomeia outside the walls of Athens. It was the place of education for those Athenian boys who did not enjoy full citizenship. Antisthenes (445–360 BC), student of Socrates and founder of the cynic school of philosophy, taught at the Kynosarges. The most famous cynic was Diogenes of Sinope (412–323 BC), allegedly residing in an empty barrel and subject of countless anecdotes.

Addendum 1 June 2004: I am pleased to discover that Kynosarges was also the title of a short-lived literary magazine whose only issue was published in Berlin anno 1802. Otherwise the name appears to have seen little use since ancient times, at least with the “K” spelling.

About the Website

The Kynosarges website was established in 1999 – not quite so ancient as its namesake but still pretty old compared to most of the Internet! I wanted a distinctive domain name to host my first small game project, Star Chess. Since then the website has grown organically with all kinds of code, links, and articles which I found interesting or useful enough to share.

Addendum April 2012: Originally I had been posting all website news directly on this page, deleting old news periodically when the list got too long. Last month I finally got more organized and started posting updates on the services linked above (WordPress, Twitter, Google+). So you won’t find any updates older than March 2012 there, in case you were wondering.

About the Domains

As a German resident I got a free .de domain from my ISP, so that’s where Kynosarges started out. However, this website is neither written in German nor specific to Germany, and it quickly acquired a global audience (however small). So I registered the kynosarges.org alias in June 2011 and have been using it in public URLs ever since, although the .de variant will remain valid as well.

An amusing incident in June 2011 provided additional incentive for the .org alias. Chinese domain hunters were evidently targeting foreign website names at random – including mine! They had only squatted on local domains such as kynosarges.cn at that point, but I decided to take preemptive action before anyone else could grab kynosarges.org.